There's a sickle in his approach, not that he's crooked, but that he's hooked to different names than his and hears them as destinations, on the slopes of Table Mountain, on the broken microphone placing Echo and Narcissus in separate ponds that they may not listen so they may be heard, or healed, or hurry, a delta flood will tease his thirst with trust, or her over and over 'til the crooked pace becomes his place and the bent clicks beneath the bend
All we know about him, is what we don't know about him
The days, the hours, the way he supports the way we are a tiny climate over which storms threaten before breaking, elsewhere. Temptation. That distortion between silence and tension. The one that bridges two actors in a thrill. A swarm. an answer, a swarm, an answer. The wind swings the door closed, but look out that window again. The opposite of this closed is close, like near, and like itself, thinking harder or more toward pairs, like the taste of licorice in an envelope when you drop it into the blue oval to be re-evaluated by fate or rode, as if (ridden) by, as if riding by as a float does decorated with husbands with confessions on their waves like banners which are muting The Last Kind Words Blues, a recitation
When you see me coming, cross the lit man's field
And It's precisely because I believe it's my voice, that I allow it to be taken over by another voice
Play on robots, people are ready now, play for us
I mean they were having an intense time of it in the old Toyota
I mean they were playing car, a race game, near their thinnest window in audio color the speed moans turned to break moans into scores, how you roam, howling about the blindness of speech in a monotone how could you, twice, how you could trust mercy grammar to double the standard so good, not now, not even now
Everything he touched he made subtler, sadder
More than that though, the ability to flip at will into dismissiveness helped maintain a sense of expert status, of standing apart from the rest
Sometimes this made him mediocre and slick. Others genius and clumsy. And all transitive combinations of these. And humble sometimes, and summonsed, dear bounty, dear hunting man, I am somebody something like him, somebody likely, and we might be the last(ing) kind,
and we might have been the last kind
And in my half-sleep, this is something I truly believe in my half-sleep, that this vigilance is actually sleep, the lenient footsteps of a memory ahead
And the blue light was my blues
(shy to prove where it hovered by where it hovers still)
And the red light was my mind
